


Call myself wound (but answer to knife)

by Irrelevancy



Series: Christmas Dark Triad [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Dark!Shanks, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Keelhauling, M/M, One-sided Shanks/Marco, Post-Marineford, Skinning, Tattoos, Torture, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:07:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843403
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Irrelevancy/pseuds/Irrelevancy
Summary: “You do owe me."Shanks had smiled, before handing Marco the end of a rope and shoving him over the ship’s bow. Marco should’ve flown. If Marco had known even an inkling of what, exactly, Shanks believed he was owed, Marco would’ve flown.Marco pays his debts from Marineford.
Relationships: Akagami no Shanks | Red-Haired Shanks/Fushichou Marco | Phoenix Marco, Fushichou Marco | Phoenix Marco & Portgas D. Ace, Fushichou Marco | Phoenix Marco & Shirohige | Whitebeard | Edward Newgate
Series: Christmas Dark Triad [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1573735
Comments: 9
Kudos: 52





	Call myself wound (but answer to knife)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [midnightluck](https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightluck/gifts).



> For lucky, except it’s the blood-eagled-rat-corpse-from-your-kitty kind of gift. But see, I’m the blood eagled rat, and lucky’s the cat animagus who’s brought herself the fucking gift.
> 
> Title's from [Nicole Homer](https://touchmycoat.tumblr.com/post/189703804095/lifeinpoetry-i-like-to-call-myself-wound-but-i), thanks for sharing with me Depths :')
> 
> Content Warning in End Notes

“You do owe me.”

Shanks had _smiled_ , before handing Marco the end of a rope and shoving him over the ship’s bow. Marco should’ve flown. If Marco had known even an inkling of what, exactly, Shanks believed he was owed, Marco would’ve flown.

(“We both know it wouldn’t have worked out like that anyways,” Shanks would tell him later, smoothing a hand down Marco’s shivering spine in strokes that were certainly meant to be comforting. Then he laid a thoughtful palm on Marco’s shoulder blades. “I probably would’ve just cut off your wings, if you’d tried to fly off.”)

But it was with the memory of Pops and Ace’s graves on his mind that Marco felt his feet touch water. Then his calves, then his thighs. Then he was sunk. He’d wound the rope several times around his wrist before the plunge (asshole Red Hair didn’t even have the decency to knot it properly—he liked the pretense of Marco having a _choice_ ), but the simple act of keeping hold still occupied all his gale-whipped attention. Every muscle went numb and trembling as the ocean took back the power that was taken from it.

(Turned out, Marco owed everyone everything.)

Shanks hit the water beside him, all easy waves of limbs. His legs entwined onto Marco’s like a seahorse’s tail on coral, a truly _buddy_ -like linking with a grin to match. Meanwhile Marco didn’t even have the strength to glare, holding _both_ their weight now against the dragging sea.

“You _might_ as well join my crew,” Shanks wheedled, playing with the collar of Marco’s shirt, “now that Sphinx is officially under my protection.”

 _Under protection_ was an understatement; upon the resolution (an awfully benign word for an awful event) of the war at Marineford, Shanks had not only declared the protectorate, but also dispatched his very own second-in-command to hunt down the supposed Whitebeard Jr. threatening Pop’s hometown. When he was first told the news, Marco didn’t believe it, even throughout the duration of his own brief to the other Commanders. It was only when Benn Beckman and Shanks both had a hand on Marco’s shoulder, and Benn’s peeled off but Shanks’ didn’t, that Marco—

—well. It was infinitely easier to believe in something good when it came with a price.

“I feel like price,” Shanks told him, tone unwaveringly friendly even while Marco sputtered saltwater, “is only a dirty word if you don’t pay it.”

“It doesn’t work like this,” Marco insisted. The amount of attention diverted to his tongue meant the rope slipped dangerously around his wrist, fibers scoring his skin like the pull of a seastone cuff that just _wouldn’t fucking come off_. “I can hop on your boat, declare whatever I want, but everybody already _knows_ —”

“That you’re not truly mine?”

That smile, first annoyingly innocuous, was chillingly missed the moment it was gone. Then, it was all the more terrifying upon its return. The late afternoon sun was generous on Shanks’ face, those features that Marco’s always found undeniably handsome—that latent appeal might be exactly what marked Marco now for death, that _oh, but_ he _wants this, so maybe…_

And it’d be nothing Marco couldn’t survive anyways. He’s already breathed through the worst case scenario and came out disgustingly whole—what more could Shanks do to him?

(If he’d _known_ —)

And if he were to actually die—

(—he’d have flown.)

—well maybe that was just an overdue payment finally made.

“You’re right.” At first, Marco only stared in puzzlement at the knife, suddenly wielded in Shanks’ hand. It took a meaningful glance down at his chest—at Pop’s crest, inked on his skin—for Marco to start shaking, in a way that had nothing to do with the seawater and everything to do with the brand new prospect of _loss_ now introduced to him. By fucking _Red Hair_ , who’d remark, calm as you please, “it’s ‘cause of this tattoo—”

“ _Fuck_ off,” Marco _snarled_ , but maybe that sound jerking out of his throat was better described as a sob. And Shanks—Shanks wrinkled his brow smiling, looking like a man comforting a crying child in the middle of the ocean.

“Marco, c’mon.” A man with the unquestionable moral high ground, and wasn’t Marco supposed to be the bird of prey? So how come he felt more the pinned butterfly, splayed in display for Shanks’ coveting gaze? “Fair’s fair. Whitebeard gets a grave, your crew gets an out, and your father’s legacy is protected. Or is that not enough for you?”

 _Or d_ _o you believe you’re worth more than all that?_ Marco’s shuddering inhale brought his chest closer to the knife. It was taken for assent; Shanks’ legs happily squeezed around Marco’s underneath the water, and the blade edge lined up. For the wildest moment, Marco just thought of shaving; the angle of the knife wasn’t right to stab, and the only other time Marco’s had a blade that intimately close, it was Izo with a razor and a playful promise to _show you what you’ve been missing out on, bro._

And then Shanks sliced into the skin.

The hurt wasn’t unfamiliar. The troubled little frown pouting Shanks’ lips was.

“Ah, I’m going to need you to hold your skin taut for me.” With a self-effacing little wave of his stump, Shanks held his elbow out akimbo at an angle that clearly indicated to Marco where he was drawing the cut next: a generous arch above the left arm of Pop’s crest. He was, Marco realized numbly, making an outline around the ink.

A little crest of ocean water licked its way into the blood. Marco jerked in pain, and Shanks looked as if he envied it.

“What for?” Marco had to ask, but Shanks didn’t have to answer, because all he got back was an incredulous, bordering on impatient lift of eyebrows. “No, you’re insane. I’ll just—”

— _heal_?

This time, the water hit with more of a slap. Marco hissed through the stinging and shoved his way forward; Shanks’ knife dodged too quick for an aortic bisection.

“Rot in Hell,” Marco swore. The rope slipped a little bit more. “You can’t just— _It’ll grow back_.”

“If it does—” The corners of Shanks’ lips were stiff around that laugh, had been stiff since he’s had to pull his knife out from Marco’s body. “—then alright, I’ll cede to Whitebeard. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

But then—truly a man that embodied the sea—Shanks’ eyes went from drizzle to hurricane. Red swirled in the water around them, and was it the sunset gurgled and spat or Shanks’ vivid hair or the blood brought to froth by the storm (Red Hair Shanks was a storm unto himself), Marco didn’t know.

“But if it doesn’t.”

Shanks’ voice was all the more ominous in its regularity, in the way it refused to dramatically trail. Nothing dragged about him; he was riding the sea like a king. Where did that leave Marco, this deadweight split open? He’d been nothing but deadweight, once that cuff had sealed around his careless wrist. Shanks’ knife taunted him now, sly in its glinting, _don’t you wish we’d been better acquainted sooner?_ Once they’d taken Marco’s wings and filled his bones with iron, Marco had been able to _do nothing_. That day at Marineford, after Ace and Pops had been lost, with their tattered ships and flag and people, the Whitebeard Pirates had been in the exact same position Marco was in now—leaking rust, bright and red, for all the predators to pursue.

Shanks—Shanks hadn’t been the balm. Hadn’t been the hunter, the repellant, the peace officer. He’d been just another predator.

(But he’d been the only predator who would get Marco’s siblings out of the water, provided that Marco stayed.)

“So? Are we in accord?”

 _Fuck_ drowning. Pops had always said everyone was a child of the sea but Marco was _his_ child, first and foremost. No sea, no knife, no pooling red would get in the way of that.

Baring galvanized teeth, Marco dug one shaking hand into the skin of his chest, and pulled.

* * *

Shanks took no more and no less time than necessary, cutting through the layer of dermis in a neat frame around Marco’s tattoo. He made no secret of the easy pleasure he took from the process, humming as he went with that cold-hot- _melting_ blade-edge, making happy noises of encouragement every time Marco got the counter-pressure for the knife to exert against exactly right, and the line came out neat.

Then Shanks announced they could peel the mark off now, like a misplaced _sticker_ , and Marco promptly lost his grip on the rope.

When he emerged back into consciousness (who’d’ve thought that drowning looked more crimson than blue?), there was a knife hilt shoved rudely in his mouth, and Shanks was finagling the rope above Marco while keeping them both afloat by it. Marco tried to spit, but Shanks had suddenly slithered a coil around his throat and tightened it in warning.

“Now hang on, we still need that.”

It was a noose. With Marco’s body gone entirely slack, the only part of Marco that Shanks could secure the rope to had been the neck. To have engineered that single-handedly was quite the feat, and Marco might’ve appreciated it in any other state. Instead, there was only room for blurry recognition of the _oh Marco, what have you done to yourself?_ lilt in Shanks’ lopsided smile.

“I’ll never understand you fruit users—to never swim free in the sea again? Is the trade-off truly worth it?”

_Worth it? Was any of this?_

“It’s got to be worth it,” Marco whispered around the hilt in a breath so slight that even Shanks, just a hair’s breath away, didn’t hear him. It was almost as if it’s never been spoken; it’s almost as if it couldn’t be true. In that moment, chest and abdomen rimmed in unabating pain, soaked in a sea that hated him and a sky that wouldn’t take him, Marco’s entire world shrank down to just one man. The man with the absolute world order on his single palm. The man who rigged Marco a noose to help him live.

(The last man in the world who would take him now, since Ace turned around and Pops ordered him down. Shanks was the only one who has _always_ , always wanted him.)

“Here, stick your arm in this loop. I’ll tighten the knot and free my hand.”

Swallowing around a billow of salted nausea, Marco did exactly as Shanks said: stuck a quaking arm through (the right arm this time, to give his aching left a break) the loop in the rope, flush with Shanks’. In both pride and comfort, Shanks leaned into that press of arm, beaming, before quickly withdrawing his own and—just as he promised—yanking down a rope that tightened the knot.

Marco’s palm slammed into his own chin, and he bit his tongue gagging, on the knife hilt and garrote both.

“You shouldn’t suffocate if you hang on to it,” Shanks advised, all good will. Marco tried, but the effort was as good as the sun at not bleeding into the ocean and _Pops_ , where was Pops when his son was bleeding into the ocean and—had the day gone to dusk or had the corrosion taken Marco’s eyes and—there was something pulling at the knife and he had to hang onto that because _Shanks_ had told him to hang on to that and Shanks was the last man on Marco’s earth and—

Shanks’ lips were the same temperature as Marco’s cheek, cold and numb. That’s why Marco didn’t feel the kiss until it grew damp with Marco’s tears (those were the same temperature as blood, the liquid incubated inside the body until Shanks cut them out).

“You’re doing great,” it was Shanks’ turn to whisper. What couldn’t be true sounded like obedient physics on his tongue. All Marco could do was comply. He _had_ to be doing great.

“Hold out the skin for me. I have to get all the way under it now.”

After a while, Marco could feel the steady severing of every. Single. Tissue.

The first sensation, when the knife scored subcutaneous flesh, was best approximated to a tickle, if a tickle lasted shorter than an airborne splash of sea. The tickle was quick to become pain, and the pain _amplified._ It _soaked_ like sound waves down, expatiating in coaxial loops where the axis was maybe Pop’s ink and maybe Shanks’ knife, but either way Marco’s chest was the hunting grounds was the epicenter was ground zero was—

 _Oh_ _son_ _, what have you done to yourself?_

—devoured by the sea, was—

 _It’ll grow back_.

—leaking. The rust was bleeding out and maybe, Marco thought with delirious optimism, this was the key to his salvation. Maybe every inch further of inked skin Shanks separated off was another hollow bone emptied of its iron weight. Maybe this was the absolute _draining_ that could send Marco back into the skies again.

“Hey, you’re doing terrific. I got you.”

Coiled in Shanks’ legs and Shanks’ rope was the first time in a long while Marco could remember floating. It didn’t _not_ feel like flying. His hands were both numb and his breath felt far-perched just beyond the reach of his throat and there was more and more _give_ , to the thing that was in his clutch, the thing Shanks was meticulously scoring under.

(Shanks’ knuckles brushed against the raw heat of Marco’s exposed muscles sometimes, and Marco could feel the _hope_ in the way it lingered. Shanks wanted him to come out clean. Marco didn’t know how to break it to him that it was already too late, for a man like Marco. There was nothing of him left but broken rebar.)

Finally, like burrs unclinging—

— _oh god, oh god it hurts, Pops_ —

—like separating the salt from the whole damn ocean, the detachment was _unnatural_. The gory shock of it sent Marco’s hand (with the skin, with _his_ skin, with the last bit of Pops he carried now gone from its easy thoughtless seat on his body instead flown from his grip like a drenched and tattered flag, all that proud blood with nowhere to go but back to the sea it was loaned from) shaking in increasingly violent spasms. Shanks dropped the knife and caught his hand. Caught his skin.

A sea king, with more teeth and esophagus than Marco could really register, reared out of the water behind them. Which was more effortless for Shanks, Marco wondered: easing the bloody skin out of Marco’s fingers or flinging it over his shoulders, straight into the sea king’s gaping mouth?

Shanks’ haki, the nuclear conquering force of it, crashed down on Marco’s consciousness like the collapse of a tsunami wave—like dropping an entire sun on somebody’s head and Marco—

Marco woke up bandaged in Shanks’ bed. He knew this was Shanks’ bed because he’s been here before, after Benn Beckman was gone and Shanks’ hand lingered. He caught Shanks on his way out. Night had sunken through the air, and the threshold cast a shadow that swallowed Shanks nearly hold. There was no red to be seen.

“You can look,” Shanks said, gesturing at the bandages hiding Marco’s entire chest. “I’d wanted to wait with you to see, but—well, that fruit of yours is something else.”

Like blue and gold guard dogs flaring up in Marco’s defense, and Shanks had to smother them to keep them silent. The tone of Shanks’ voice though, was difficult to place—it was something that ought to be familiar rendered unrecognizable on an unexpected canvas, like Pop’s fruit in Teach’s hand.

The moment Marco placed it though, his hands flew to his chest. Pulled at the bandage like he had pulled at the skin just hours before.

“Ah well.”

Disappointment. Shanks sounded disappointed.

That smile. A gambling man who has lost a hand to the player he most expected the loss from, but whom he also dreaded the loss from most. A falconer with the prey dead at his feet but a snapped leash.

Black ink sprawled across Marco’s chest, a little fainter perhaps, and Marco could laugh, could weep. The Strongest Man in the World yet, even in death. This was Marco’s _belonging_ , the red in blood and salt in the sea, breath to lungs and under wings. His bones were light again.

Shanks wasn’t smiling anymore.

“I guess there’s always next time.”

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Shanks skins off Marco's tattoo in the ocean. There's some choking involved.
> 
> listen,, all i asked was "hey lucky, got some good torture ideas?" and, ,, what was it that you said lucky? Putting on and taking off a tattoo are just two parts of the same process????
> 
> i field complaints and further requests on my [tumblr](https://touchmycoat.tumblr.com/) ndjfkdsnjfd


End file.
